Apologies if he’s been mentioned, but Mike Connors (born in 1925) had his first TV role in 1952. He’s best known for the series Mannix.
His most recent (and I assume will be the last) credit was as one of Evelyn Harper’s boyfriends on Two and a Half Men in 2007. He looked good and he would have been 82 at the time.
Coming back around to the OP, Nancy Olson performed on Your Show of Shows in '52 soon after her Oscar nomination for Supporting Actress, and she followed up with a good deal of small-screen acting roles: a made-for-TV production of The Women with Mary Astor and Shelley Winters; plus The Best Of Broadway, with Fredric March and Claudette Colbert; and Ford Star Jubilee, with Hans Conried and Bing Crosby; and et cetera and et cetera, all before '57.
In '57, she appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show alongside Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly; after '57, her latest acting credit is – well, this year, in a movie with Carl Reiner.
After performing on Broadway in the 1940s, Lee Grant made her television debut on Actor’s Studio in 1950 – and after acting on Studio One In Hollywood and Danger, she spent a year on the Search For Tomorrow soap opera, after which she bounced around from The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse with Jack Warden and Eli Wallach to The Alcoa Hour with Boris Karloff and Jason Robards to Playwrights '56 with Patrick Macnee and E. G. Marshall, and so on for Ponds Theater and The Plymouth Playhouse and et cetera.
And after '56, she became Emmy winner Lee Grant, and Oscar winner Lee Grant, and writer/director/producer Lee Grant; next year she’s set to be 90-year-old Lee Grant.
Barbara Barrie was WAC Corporal Edna Martin on The Phil Silvers Show in '55 and '56 and '57 – and '58 and '59, but that’s irrelevant to the OP; of relevance to the OP are all the other TV roles she picked up before the cut-off date, alongside everyone from a pre-Bewitched Alice Ghostley to a young Warren Beatty.
She even appeared on Robert Montgomery Presents with Diana Douglas, who (a) has TV credits going back to the '40s, and (b) acted on General Electric Theater with Charlton Heston, and Medallion Theatre with Henry Fonda, and so on.
Claire Bloom, who was Queen Mary on the big screen in The King’s Speech, was a small-screen Queen Victoria in Robert Montgomery Presents back in '57.
(And that was after she’d been a small-screen Roxane to José Ferrer’s Cyrano, as well as a small-screen Juliet to John Neville’s Romeo, and even a small-screen Cleopatra to Cedric Hardwicke’s Caesar, and et cetera for her other early-television credits dating back to a TV movie she did in '52.)
Back before Marisa Pavan did Oscar-nominated movie work with Burt Lancaster in '55, she acted on Fireside Theatre and Studio One In Hollywood and Front Row Center; in '56 and '57, you could see her on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and What’s My Line? and Climax! – not to mention starring as Antigone in a made-for-television version of, well, Antigone, with Claude Rains as Creon.
Mickey Mouse is still chasing Minnie.
Speaking of longevity, how about Hal Holbrook? Sure, the guy was a castmember on The Brighter Day from '54 to '59 – but note that he also found time to pop in for an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show in '56 as Mark Twain, because, hey, (a) no matter that he keeps acting in movies; and (b) regardless of whether he eventually wins that fifth Emmy, we all know his life’s work is playing Sam Clemens while clad in a suit as white as his signature facial hair.
George Gaynes is instantly recognizable as that grandfatherly sixtysomething from the '80s – be it as Punky Brewster’s foster dad, or as Commandant Lassard from the Police Academy movies, or even as the aging soap-opera actor making life difficult for Dustin Hoffman as Michael Dorsey as Dorothy Michaels as Emily Kimberly.
But before that, he was a thirtyish Broadway performer working with Wally Cox and Robert Culp on NBC Television Opera Theatre, and on West Point with a pre-Rifleman Chuck Connors, and even on a One Touch Of Venus TV movie, all before '57.
(In his twenties, of course, he was busy serving in the military during WWII.)
Pat Carroll actually won an Emmy for her pre-'58 TV work with Sid Caesar, after a year as a performer on The Red Buttons Show after acting on Goodyear Playhouse with Ernest Borgnine. And she appeared on episodes of The Jimmy Durante Show in 1955 – the same year she acted on Kraft Theatre and Producers’ Showcase – a year after appearing on The Saturday Night Revue with Paul Lynde, and doing a TV movie with Bob Cummings, and acting on The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse with Patrick O’Neal.
And she’s been working in the decades since voicing Ursula in The Little Mermaid: a recurring role on ER, a small part in Bridesmaids – heck, she was most recently seen acting in a movie that just came out last month, in her eighties but still doing what she did in her twenties alongside Henny Youngman.
A good decade before Henry Silva was exchanging karate chops with Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate, you could see him acting on television: making his screen debut in 1950 with Armstrong Circle Theatre before appearing in Lights Out and doing a made-for-TV version of Darkness at Noon with Lee J. Cobb. And you could see him on Suspicion, opposite a young Michael Landon; and on Climax! and on West Point and et cetera, all before the OP’s cut-off date.
He also did a 1956 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents with Kathleen Hughes, who’d acted on TV with a pre-Batman Stafford Repp and was back for more Hitchcock in '57 with a pre-Bewitched Dick York and a pre-Gilligan’s Island Russell Johnson; she’d have more pre-'58 TV credits, but she was busy making movies – y’know, with Jim Backus, and with Natalie Schafer, and with Alan Hale Jr (and, at that, with Russell Johnson, since IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE wouldn’t have been the same without 'em).
(And before you dock her points for, say, Bob Denver, or Dawn Wells – well, look, they weren’t in movies back then, so she instead made a movie with a pre-Fugitive David Janssen, and one with a pre-Make Room For Daddy Danny Thomas, and one with a pre-Andy Griffith Show Frances Bavier, and so on.)
Actually, Ron Howard has a number of 1959 television credits. It’s surprising how much work he did prior to The Andy Griffith Show or Happy Days. The man literally has never had a job besides entertainment.
Karen Sharpe, the widow of film director Stanley Kramer is still alive. She was a regular on the 1950s Western, Johnny Ringo.
Mark Goddard, most famous in his role on Lost in Space, has a 1959 television credit.
Gloria DeHaven, a longtime Hollywood actress has multiple 1950s television credits.Her last credit was a 2000 episode of Touched by an Angel
Unfortunately, the OP specified pre-'58 credits. So someone like, say, Van Dyke Parks qualifies on the strength of his child-actor work on Bonino in '53 – and on Goodyear Playhouse and Ponds Theater and Campbell Summer Soundstage in '54, and Windows and The Elgin Hour and Studio One In Hollywood in '55, and Kraft Theatre and Star Tonight and General Electric Theater in '56, and so on – and, as it happens, he was still acting on-screen in the '80s and '90s, and as per IMDB has been steadily racking up ‘composer’ credits on TV and in the movies since the turn of the century.
Georgann Johnson has some pretty varied Golden-Age-Of-Television credits: before all those Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes in '56 and '57, she (a) played Princess Arura on Captain Video And His Video Rangers on a break from her recurring role with Wally Cox on the Mister Peepers sitcom; (b) did a small-screen dramatic production of Bang The Drum Slowly with Paul Newman; © did a TV movie musical with Jayne Mansfield; (d) appeared on the Down You Go game show, and (e) acted with James Dean on Campbell Summer Soundstage.
Which ain’t bad, considering how much time she spent performing on Broadway with Jack Lemmon or making a movie with Jimmy Cagney.
Plus, she also did all those pre-'58 episodes of Studio One In Hollywood, and all those episodes of Armstrong Circle Theatre and all those episodes of Danger and et cetera; be it Ellery Queen or The Larry Storch Show or Tales Of Tomorrow, she was just about always on call.
Abby Dalton, most famous from her numerous 1970s game show appearances and her role on the 1980’s nighttime soap opera Falcon Crest is still very much alive. She first appeared on TV Westerns in 1957 and 1958, including Maverick and The Rifleman.
Not sure if anyone has mentioned her but Elinor Donahue is still very much alive. While she is best for her role on The Andy Griffith Show, there are many who remember her as “Kitten” on the Robert Young classic “Father Knows Best.”
Elena Verdugo is also alive. While best known as Dr. Marcus Welby’s assistant, Consuelo, she all had many television roles throughout the 1950s, including ***The Red Skelton Show ***and her own sitcom, Make Room for Millie
Richard Beymer racked up pre-'58 TV credits – on 26 Men, Zane Grey Theater, Cavalcade of America, The Gray Ghost, and so on from Make Room For Daddy back through to the Sandy Dreams television series in '49 – before he pulled off the acting coup of his career with West Side Story.
(Not his performance; convincing the filmmakers to pick him over Warren Beatty as a budding movie star who can display believable chemistry with Natalie Wood.)
No, she was Betty aka “Princess”. Lauren Chapin played Kathy aka “Kitten”.
Indeed. Plus I would say she’s better known for Father Knows Best than for The Andy Griffith Show.
Cloris is tied with Ruby Dee for appearing on TV in 1946, when she helped demonstrate this headset intercom whatchamacallit. Looks like only Norman Lloyd (1939) still survives from the prewar experiments, unless some child performer made a long-forgotten appearance.
Not behind a camera - that we know about - but Marian spent some time as a teen hanging around the CBS-TV studio at Grand Central Terminal, which her dad, Gilbert Seldes, ran during the late '30s and early '40s.
It’s hardly surprising that Alfred Hitchcock had the twentysomething actress from Strangers On A Train act in half-a-dozen Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes in '55 and '56 and '57 – or that she kept at it in '58 and '59 and '60, by which point he also gave her a part in Psycho – because, after all, she was Patricia Hitchcock.
(That said, she had a decent amount of other early TV credits: a Suspense episode with Oscar winner Thomas Mitchell; a Front Row Center episode with a pre-Batman Alan Napier; and et cetera from Screen Directors Playhouse to Matinee Theatre before '57, followed by acting on Playhouse 90 with a young Robert Loggia.)
